Where Are the Wild Things? Everywhere Dave Eggers Is

Usually the doings at the Frankfurt Book Fair concern books too far ahead or too far abroad to hit our radar, but one report did catch my eye this year. Apparently, not only is Dave Eggers adapting Where the Wild Things Are for the movies, as Paul noted yesterday, but for fiction as well. According to PW Daily, Ecco has acquired a novel from Eggers based on the Sendak book for publication in fall 2008, just when the movie's coming out, and thinks it will be "his biggest book" (which is saying something). My reaction: slight horror, mixed with curiosity. For one thing, adapting the original picture book for a movie seems natural (and I'm looking forward to it) compared to the idea of filling up that spare little story, whose brilliance in large part consists of what it leaves out, with words, words, words. How often can we read, as in the screenplay snippet New York revealed, "Max can't believe what he's seeing"?

And then there's the whole Dave Eggers/McSweeney's childhood infatuation. In this month's American Scholar, novelist Melvin Jules Bukiet laid waste to an entire borough with his piece on "Brooklyn Books of Wonder," the recent rash of fiction and memoirs (from Sebold, Foer, Krauss, Kunkel, and Goldberg, as well as Eggers and his McSweeney's/Believer empire) that celebrate wide-eyed youth (and a few oldsters) triumphing over trauma. The idea of Eggers, the presiding genius of this whole child-centered moment, diving into the ur-text of Zoom-era upbringing, seems so spot-on that it's in danger of imploding. It's like Norman Mailer writing on Marilyn Monroe: so deep inside someone's obsessions that it gets claustrophobic.

Or, possibly, he's found his great subject. Despite the well-known clairvoyance of bloggers, all we can do is wait a year to find out for ourselves. --Tom